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View From the Villa Terrace: In the Val de Cecina Looking toward Chianti © Leslie Ehrin 2005-2008
In 1998, what initially caught my interest about painting the Chianti region was the richly textured, highly organized, quilt like patterns of planting in the landscape. These patterns were first observed from the Pitti Palace Boboli Gardens in Florence while shooting photographs of fellow tourists seated on picturesque stone walls, with Florence and the Chianti Region in various directional background vistas. As I later traveled through Chianti that first time on the Vespa, it seemed to me as if groups of Italian farmers had stitched needlepoint pieces of landscape together so that the land surrounding one villa was seamlessly connected to its neighbor along neatly delineated lines of evenly planted vineyards and olive trees. In 2001, when I returned to the same region with a group of painters from The Wayne Art Center, I was again struck by the same impression and my interest in painting the interlocking textures of the landscape continued. The view from the terrace at our Villa during that trip, called Il Mocajo, was so brilliantly illuminated every morning and so hauntingly beautiful in shadows during the late afternoon and evening sunsets that it captured my attention in fixed reveries and it has been painted by me several times. This particular iteration of the view seems the hottest and most intense of all, however, not only due to the strength of the sun on the land, but due to a real sense of heat derived while looking at that view. One evening, while in the upstairs kitchen cooking dinner at the Villa and gazing out the window view, the linen shirt I was wearing caught fire when I sat too close to a candle placed on the dinner table. I was so engrossed in the view, that when the entire shirt burst into flames, I did not immediately notice. It was only when friends tackled and rolled me on the floor while screaming "drop and roll, let's tear the shirt off of her" that I realized there was a problem. Luckily, thanks to quick thinking friends, I was unharmed, but the shirt was laid to rest the next morning, after sunrise, when again, I went out to paint this View from the Terrace and buried it within the patchwork landscape of colors and textures.
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